The present invention relates to managing client-server based application performance, and more particularly to detecting and determining root causes of mobile application faults and performance bottlenecks.
A mobile application has two main components in a client-server model: (1) a client side component running on the mobile device; and (2) a server side component that responds to various requests from the client. Known techniques for detection and analysis of anomalies in mobile application performance utilize mobile analytics but provide either only device analytics (i.e., by monitoring client side mobile applications) or only back-end analytics (i.e., by monitoring server side infrastructure), without taking into account details of client-server interactions end-to-end. For example, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2010/0041391 discloses a client-focused mobile analytics process that collects mobile device metrics at the mobile device. Known techniques for using the analytics to determine a root cause of the anomaly requires a significant amount of time for labor-intensive manual searches to discover where the error originated. The manual searches are painstaking because an application fault or a performance bottleneck may originate in one place and time, but manifest itself at another place and another time. Accordingly, there is a need for mobile analytics technique that has an integrated view across the device and the back-end and which is a less time-consuming technique for determining a likely root cause of the anomaly.